ANOTHER SEASON OPENS AT FALLBROOK’S MOST HISTORICAL FIELD

The first game of the 2013 season is not for six more weeks, if you check with the San Diego Padres.

Here in Fallbrook, however, baseball returned for the spring on Friday night.

When it did, I was behind the chain link at Zeke Weaver Memorial Field, trying to contain my toddler. Wearing his little mitt, yearning for the diamond, Isaiah peered out at the big boys in their spikes and numbered jerseys and said plaintively, “I need to play baseball.”

That is the way opening night should make you feel.

Dev Colin, president of the Bonsall-Fallbrook Little League, was admonishing the parents to behave during the season, which would begin with an early game the next morning, and then it was time for the unofficial first pitch.

“Do we have a ball?” Colin said, spinning toward the mass of players and coaches grouped behind him on the infield. “It’s a baseball field. Is there a ball anywhere?”

One was produced and a little guy, maybe 8 years old, single-hopped it to the teenager behind the plate. The crowd went wild.

A few minutes later, a Mercy Air helicopter landed just beyond the 200-foot sign in center field and a paramedic trotted over to throw the official first pitch. “I always wanted to do that,” he said into the microphone before running back to the helicopter.

Because the league shares the field with the North County Fire Protection District’s downtown station, life flight choppers occasionally interrupt the baseball games by landing there for an emergency pickup, explained Colin, a longtime Marine Corps pilot.

That isn’t the field’s only distinction, though.

While the other baseball diamonds in Fallbrook are clustered a few miles to the south, Zeke Weaver Field is tucked off Ivy Street, as much a part of downtown Fallbrook as Main Avenue itself.

Weaver, understand, was a hometown boy who almost made it to the Major Leagues, according to Vivian Collins, a league officer who helped oversee the league’s move from Bonsall Elementary School in the early 2000s.

“(Weaver) had an opportunity to try out for the Bigs — I don’t know what team — but he didn’t get to go because, the night before, his wife went into labor,” Collins told me. “He missed his chance to try out for a Major League Baseball team, never got to play, so he dedicated himself to this field, and to Little League.

“He was a much-beloved coach for years. His wife kept score in that booth — they probably built that booth,” she added, motioning toward the tiny concrete enclosure beside Ivy Street that overlooks home plate.

In the year 2013, about 200 kids in the Bonsall-Fallbrook Little League have the distinction of playing on the town’s most historical field, below what is now the Fallbrook Boys & Girls Club.

After opening as the original high school in 1913, that building was soon joined by a baseball diamond that would spend many of the ensuing decades in disrepair.

With the help of Duke Snider, Fallbrook’s premier outfielder, Weaver restored and dedicated the field in the 1970s, and boys were once again learning the hit-and-run, the double play, through seasons and seasons of Little League Baseball.